The Kitchen Boy Rhetorical Analysis

What would you if you knew a secret that changed everything? In The Kitchen Boy, Robert Alexander tells the story of the imprisonment and execution of Tsar Nicholas and his family. Leonka, now Misha, once the kitchen boy to the Romanovs, claims to be the last living witness to the family’s execution. Misha uses exposition, foreshadowing, and dramatic irony to create suspense as he retells the story of those final days of the Imperial Family.

In The Kitchen Boy, Misha uses multiple several literary devices to add suspense to his tale. There are several times when he will interrupt the story in order to explain something, whether it is his personal feelings or important information. At the beginning of the novel, Misha also gives his audience

He hints at future events in the story before they happen. “I alone know what happened that awful night,” he says, “just as I alone know where the bodies of the two missing children are to be found. You see, I took care of them with my own hands.” (Alexander, 3) Misha also includes a few seemingly insignificant details in his tale that actually prove to be major giveaways from the true story revealed at the end of the book.

In the novel, Misha uses dramatic irony to toy with the minds of his audience. He claims to know what happened that fateful night, but everyone else is seemingly unaware of what is going to happen to them. “I saw,” he says, “that Anastasiya cradled her treasured dog, Jimmy, who was so ominously quiet.” Both Misha and his audience are aware of something important, something of which the characters in the story are not aware. Misha has previously mentioned the execution of the Romanov family, and every word he uses hints at it even more. In The Kitchen Boy, Misha uses exposition and foreshadowing to create suspense as he retells the tale of the imprisonment and execution of Tsar Nicholas and his family. He entertains and engages his audience with dramatic irony. At the end of the story, everything is explained from the conversation between Misha’s granddaughter, Kate, and the Novice Marina. Overall, the narrator cast a suspenseful and mysterious mood in the telling of his